Abstract
The image of Shelley as a poet unconcerned with contemporary fame maintains a remarkable tenacity, such that his popular image might still be summed up by the description of him in Edward Trelawny’s 1878 Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author: “Whilst he lived, his works fell still-born from the press; he never complained of the world’s neglect, or expressed any other feeling than surprise at the rancorous abuse wasted on an author who had no readers.” Trelawny’s description in essence, of course, describes a claim to celebrity—a celebrity Shelley maintains despite, or even because of, his lack of readers, and a celebrity Trelawny hoped would sell copies of his memoir. Trelawny indeed continues his account of Shelley’s indifference to fame by quoting a telling conversation with the poet: “‘But for the reviewers,’ he said, laughing, ‘I should be entirely unknown.’ ‘But for them,’ I observed, ‘Williams and I would never have crossed the Alps in chase of you. Our curiosity as sportsmen was excited to see and have a shot at so strange a monster as they represented you to be.’”1
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Notes
Edward Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878) (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000), p. 164.
See, for example, Stephen Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetic Form in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), pp. 193–226
Kim Wheatley, Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
P.B. Shelley, Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Reiman and Powers, ed., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 135. Readers often see The Cenci as one step in a dialectic of ideas about morality and tyranny that extends over Shelley’s career; in this sense, it is often read as a response to or modification of Prometheus Unbound. A dialectical schema underlies the discussions of the play by Earl Wasserman and Jerrold Hogle. See Wasserman’s Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971), pp. 84–130
Hogle’s Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), pp. 147–62.
Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970)
Julie Carlson, In the Theater of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994)
Stuart Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988)
Percy B. Shelley, The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts (Italy: Printed for C. and J. Ollier, London, 1819).
See Mary Jacobus, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1986).
William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), p. 151.
Mary Shelley, Matilda in Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, Maria, Matilda, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 172.
For discussions of Beatrice as a performer, see Carlson, pp. 181–98 and Andrea Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 96–129.
Peter Brooks, “The Revolutionary Body,” in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991), pp. 35–54
Barbara Groseclose, “The Incest Motif in Shelley’s The Cenci,” Comparative Drama. 19 (Fall 1985) 222–39
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© 2009 Eric Eisner
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Eisner, E. (2009). The Cenci’s Celebrity. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250840_4
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